In 2012, when I started watching Hollywood movies for the first time, I fell in love with teen dramas and couldn’t stop watching them. One of those movies was Monte Carlo that starred Selena Gomez.
(What a sweet film it was)
So somewhen in my life, I developed a really bad (or good) habit of searching every movie, series that I watch on Wikipedia and reading everything from A to Z. There, exploring the cast of Monte Carlo I found the actor named Pierre Boulanger who played the hero to Selena Gomez in the movie. Exploring his page, in the filmography section, reflexively I stopped at the title “Monsieur Ibrahim”. There was an immediate startle and a rush of curiosity that “What the name ‘Ibrahim’ was doing on a French actor’s profile? What isn’t Abraham?” I clicked the link and found that the film was based on a French novel called Monsieur Ibrahim Et Les Fleurs De Coran or in English, Monsieur Ibrahim and Flowers Of Quran. What a beautiful name, I thought.
I started looking for the movie but never found it in HD, or never found the subtitles or a dub. Years passed, I kept searching from time to time and somehow one day the query came with success on a torrent page, and I found it. My soul was at rest, and now I could die in peace.
So the movie… is purely aesthetic. Stars one of my favorite Egyptian actors, Omar Sharif alongside Pierre Boulanger, the guy we talked about above. A Jewish boy named Moses has a habit of stealing things from Monsieur Ibrahim and even though the shopkeeper is aware of it, he never catches onto him and lets him do his work, and keeps on doing his own. That’s where the story begins.
Monsieur Ibrahim has a catchphrase of his own, “I know what’s in my Quran.”
The plot focuses on the ups and downs in the life of Moses and the simple, stable, and slow life of Monsieur Ibrahim on the other hand. And then there’s a major part of the flick about their journey to Turkey.
The films have some scenes that reflect libertine Sufism that might be a little comfortable for practicing Muslims, but overall it’s a “watch to remember.”
